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  • Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China
  • Jani Klotz
Matthew Kohrman , Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, 285 pp.

The complexity of modern China, with its enormous and diverse population, rural and urban divisions, post-Maoist transition to a "liberal" socialist economy, and increasing engagement in global political and economic arenas, is a daunting field for any anthropologist to enter. To take on the particularities of the conceptualization and embodied experience of disability, as well as the intimate interrelation between these and bureaucratic institutional formation within China, is a mammoth task. Such a "multi-sited" ethnography (Marcus 1998) has been handled with great insight, dexterity and theoretical astuteness by Matthew Kohrman in his book Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China.

Kohrman traces the evolution of a category of people who have become known in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) as canji, which loosely translates as "the physically disabled." Kohrman's interest in the lived experience of canji as "embodied otherness" encompasses the dual notions of alterity and bodiliness where alterity is defined as sociopolitically mediated otherness and bodiliness as the sociopolitically mediated body-self (Kohrman 2005:2-6). The intimacy of such lived experiences, and the identification of the body-self as canji, however, is not one that has evolved uniformly across the PRC. Nor has [End Page 355] it emerged in isolation. Influenced by international notions of disability and Chinese sociocultural values and practices, as well as intimately connected with the formation of state bureaucracy in the guise of the China Disabled Persons' Federation, a person who is commonly identified as canji has come to be associated with an immobile, (young) urban male. Mostly polio sufferers, the experiences of these young men in relation to the Federation, as well as to the nation-state and other institutions involved in the health and well-being of bodies, exemplifies what Kohrman has termed "biobureaucracy" (Kohrman 2005:3). As Kohrman has argued, the involvement of bodies in the formation of biobureaucracy and alterity is "mutually constitutive within and across social and historical contexts" (Kohrman 2005:xii).

Kohrman has drawn on a range of theoretical notions in order to interpret this complex interplay of bodies and institutions, including disability theories, contemporary feminism and narrative theory, as well as the ideas of Mauss (1979), Foucault (1965, 1971, 1973, 1977, 1980, 1984, 1985) and Weber (1946, 1978). Influenced by Mauss' (1979) insight that bodies are "physio-psycho-sociological assemblages," Kohrman seeks to understand the connection between the sociopolitical, the somatic and the personal in relation to the notion and experience of canji (Kohrman 2005: 5). As he argues, the disabled body in the PRC reveals processes involved in the production of alterity and identity as well as the formation of institutionalization and knowledge. It is here that Kohrman draws on Foucault's (1965, 1973, 1977) notions of biopower and biopolitics, arguing that the role of knowledge, discourse and normalization—in this case the Western concept of a "normal" biological body—has infiltrated the sociopolitical arena beyond the biological sciences and their related fields. However, Kohrman (2005:8-10, 34-5) acknowledges that the body should not be reduced to a passive material or symbolic construct but must also be understood in terms of agency and subjectification. In particular, Kohrman is interested in exploring Foucault's (1984, 1985) later ideas regarding the interrelation between "technologies of domination" and the "processes by which the individual acts upon himself" (Kohrman 2005:183). Kohrman takes umbrage with Foucault for not recognizing the importance of the inner workings of the state and it'-s relation to the development of biobureaucracy and embodied experience. As Kohrman illustrates, the intersection of particular forms of modernism, history, governmentality and nationalism in the PRC has produced a distinctive expression of biobureaucracy, as well as distinct and diverse forms of alterity and disability. And, as he elaborates, it is not just the role of modernity, biopolitical discourses and state imperatives [End Page 356] that have produced a category of people...

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